News about what is happening in technology today!

On the Internet, as in life, men and women have different motivations for doing what they do. According to a recent report from Pew Internet and American Life, women view the Internet as a place to extend, support, and nurture relationships and communities. Men tend to see it as an office, a library, or a playground–screw the community, this is about function not family.

The report found that women are more enthusiastic communicators, using email in a more robust way. Not only sending and receiving more email than men, women are more likely to write to family and friends about a variety of topics, sharing news, joys and worries, planning events, and forwarding jokes and stories.

While both sexes equally appreciate the efficiency and convenience of email, women are more likely than men to value the medium for its positive effects on improving relationships, expanding networks, and encouraging teamwork at the office.

“Women also value email for a kind of positive, water-cooler effect, which lightens the atmosphere of office life,” reads the 54-page report.

The report found that women are more likely to use the Internet for emailing, getting maps and directions (after all, we men always know where we’re going), looking for health and medical information, seeking support for health and personal problems, and getting religious information.

Men tend to be more intense Internet users than women, being more likely to go online daily (61% of men and 57% of women) and more likely to go online several times a day (44% of men and 39% of women).

Men also tend to go online in greater numbers than women but for a much broader variety of reasons. Men are more likely to use the Internet to check the weather, get news, find do-it-yourself information, acquire sports scores and information, look for political information, do job-related research, download software, listen to music, rate a product/person/service through an online reputation system, download music, use a webcam, and take a class.

Note there was nothing about “nurturing relationships.”

Here are some stats for the number crunchers:

• 67% of the adult American population goes online, including 68% of men and 66% of women

• 86% of women ages 18-29 are online, compared with 80% of men that age.

• 34% of men 65 and older use the Internet, compared with 21% of women that age.

• 62% of unmarried men compared with 56% of unmarried women go online

• 75% of married women and 72% of married men go online

• 61% of childless men compared with 57% of childless women go online

• 81% of men with children and 80% of women with children go online.

• 52% of men and 48% of women have high-speed connections at home

• 94% of online women and 88% of online men use email

The associated press is reporting that the NSA is putting cookies on visiting computers. Apparently it is unlawful for the government to put anything but a session cookie out unless it’s expressed in the site’s privacy policy.” From the article: “Don Weber, an NSA spokesman, said in a statement Wednesday that the cookie use resulted from a recent software upgrade. Normally, the site uses temporary, permissible cookies that are automatically deleted when users close their Web browsers, he said, but the software in use shipped with persistent cookies already on. … In a 2003 memo, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget prohibits federal agencies from using persistent cookies _ those that aren’t automatically deleted right away _ unless there is a ‘compelling need.’ A senior official must sign off on any such use, and an agency that uses them must disclose and detail their use in its privacy policy.

Got socks instead of the new DVD writer you were looking for this holiday season? Tom’s Hardware has a writeup on the latest DVD writers and their ‘true speeds’. The conclusions may be surprising: higher speeds won’t necessarily do any good as media availability continues to be a problem.” From the article: “Despite the stagnation of write speeds for DVD-R and DVD+R at 16x, new DVD writers are regularly being marketed, since performance for other types of writing (RW and dual-layer) is still improving. But as is customary, manufacturers of writers have a lead on media manufacturers. For this article, we visited all the stores to see what types of media are actually available for sale, and once again the result was most enlightening. You can find 16x-compatible -R and +R discs, but in the other formats they simply aren’t out there.

There’s a history of pranks and hacks in the year-end issue of the Economist, including MIT hacks, the Bonsai Kitten, and the Pentagon hack by my favorite, Abbie Hoffman.” From the article: “At Harvard’s neighbour, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ‘hacks’, as the MIT crowd calls them, are more serious. So serious, in fact, that in 2003 the institute’s best hacks were assembled in a 178-page book, ‘Nightwork’. The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across. Mr Peterson’s book includes an 11-point code for pranksters: leave no damage, do not steal, do not drop things off a building without a ground crew, and so on. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at least, student pranks have become an establishment activity.

Sony BMG and a group of class action lawyers have reached a provisional settlement in the U.S. Sony rootkit class actions. Sony will pay cash compensation and give away free downloads from a choice of music download services including Apple iTunes as part of the deal. The settlement includes a host of restrictions on future Sony DRM use, which Michael Geist argues provides the starting point for a future Digital Rights Management Protection Act.